Professor Robert Horwitz
Winter 2003 Friday 10-1 MCC 201
Office: MCC 105 Telephone: 534-7192 E-mail: rhorwitz@ucsd.edu
Office hours: Tues 1:30 – 2:30, Wed 11-12, and by appointment
The course explores the relationship between communication and democracy at both theoretical and empirical levels. We begin with a reexamination of the communicative claims of modernization theory, that is, the asserted correlation between rising incomes, media use, psychological empathy, and democracy. In this context, we explore what is democracy and what are its salient characteristics, both formal (that is, institutions and procedures) and informal (the questions of ideals, culture, and voluntary associations). We move to the public sphere debate, and the communicative theory of democracy. Next we engage in an extended “applications” section, which includes an investigation into how people talk (or not) about politics; the interplay between markets, law, and democracy in the institutional arena of US communications; an investigation into whether and how an international human rights advocacy network has forged a kind of new international public sphere (and claims to universal values) that has begun to tread upon the old international relations doctrine of state sovereignty; a rendition of the hate speech debate as a way to appreciate the question whether words can be used as weapons to silence and to politically disenfranchise certain groups; and a section on whether and how technology and expertise may both facilitate and undermine democracy. The course concludes with a return to theory.
Some of the prominent books will be available for purchase at the University Bookstore. We will set up a closed electronic reserve system via the library to enable you to download articles and book chapters.
Week 1: General background in democratic theory; the relationship between civil society and the state
• Robert A. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (Yale, 1989), pp. 13-33;
• John Keane, “Remembering the Dead,” in Keane, Democracy and Civil Society (Verso, 1988), pp. 32-69;
• Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in Robert Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (Norton, 1978), pp. 26-52.
[NOTE: So as not to waste a week, this reading is to be done prior to the first class session. I will put originals in a box in the department mailroom.]
Week 2: The purported link between democracy and development, and the communicative claims of modernization theory
• Frederic C. Schaffer, Democracy in Translation: Understanding Politics in an Unfamiliar Culture (Cornell, 1998), pp. 1-14;
• Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (Free Press, 1958), pp. 19-75;
• Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (Johns-Hopkins, 1981), pp. 27-63;
• Alfred Stepan & Juan J. Linz, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation (Johns Hopkins, 1996), pp. 3-83;
• Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, Vol. I (Blackwell, 1996), pp. 1-25; Vol. III (Blackwell, 1998), pp. 70-165.
Recommended: Eva Bellin, Stalled Democracy: Capital, Labor, and the Paradox of State-Directed Development (Cornell University Press, 2002).
Week 3: Democracy as more than formal political institutions: culture, associations, and “social capital”
• The Encyclopedia of Democracy, ed. Seymour Martin Lipset (Congressional Quarterly, 1995):
--Geraint Parry, “Types of Democracy,” pp. 1277-1284;
--Claus Offe & Philippe Schmitter, “Future of Democracy,” pp. 511-517;
• Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. JP Mayer (Perennial Classics, 1969), pp. 50-57, 429-441, 503-528, 561-572;
• Nancy L. Rosenbloom, “Navigating Pluralism: The Democracy of Everyday Life (and Where It Is Learned),” in Stephen L. Elkin & Karol Edward Soltan, eds., Citizen Competence and Democratic Institutions (Penn State University Press, 1999), pp. 67-88;
• Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions of Modern Italy (Princeton, 1993), pp. 121-185;
• Jason Kaufman, For the Common Good? American Civic Life and the Golden Age of Fraternity (Oxford, 2002), pp. 1-55;
• Frederic C. Schaffer, Democracy in Translation: Understanding Politics in an Unfamiliar Culture (Cornell, 1998), pp. 14-64.
Week 4: The public sphere debate
• Jurgen Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (MIT, 1989);
• Jurgen Habermas, “Science and Technology as Ideology,” in Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (Beacon, 1975), pp. 81-122;
• Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (MIT, 1992), pp. 109-142.
Week 5: Applications I – How do Americans talk about and practice politics?
• Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life (Cambridge, 1998);
• Michael Schudson, “Why Conversation is Not the Soul of Democracy,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication Vol. 14 (1997), pp. 297-309.
Week 6: Applications II – Media and markets
• C. Edwin Baker, Media, Markets and Democracy (Cambridge, 2001);
• Robert Horwitz, “On Media Concentration and the Diversity Question,” Federal Communications Law Journal (forthcoming).
Week 7: Applications III – International human rights
• Michael Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry (Princeton, 2001);
• Margaret E. Keck & Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Cornell, 1998), pp. 1-37;
• Kenneth Anderson, “Secular Eschatologies and Class Interests,” in Carrie Gustafson & Peter Juviler, eds., Religion and Human Rights: Conflicting Claims (M.E. Sharpe, 1999), pp. 107-116.
• Robert Horwitz, “Truth Commissions, Nation-Building, and International Human Rights: The South African Experience and Reflections on the Politics of Human Rights Post 9/11,” in Andrew Calabrese & Colin Sparks, eds., Toward a Political Economy of Culture: Capitalism and Communication in the 21st Century (Rowman & Littlefield, forthcoming).
Week 8: Applications IV – Hate speech(-acts?)
• Mari Matsuda, “Public Response to Racist Speech: Considering the Victim’s Story,” Michigan Law Review (August 1989), pp. 2320-2381;
• Catherine MacKinnon, “Not a Moral Issue,” in Feminism Unmodified (Harvard, 1987), pp. 146-162;
• Randall Kennedy, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (Pantheon, 2002);
• Wendy Brown, “Moralism as Anti-Politics,” in Politics Out of History (Princeton, 2001), pp. 18-44.
Week 9: Applications VI – Technology
• Egon Bittner, “Technique and the Conduct of Life,” Social Problems (February 1983), pp. 249-261;
• Esther Dyson et al, “Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age” (Release 1.2, August 22, 1994);
• Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search For Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago, 1986), pp. 3-39, 85-117;
• Langdon Winner, “Technology Today: Utopia or Dystopia?” Social Research (Fall 1997), pp. 989-1017.
• Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living With High-Risk Technologies (Basic Books, 1984), pp. 3-61;
• Ulrich Beck, The Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (Sage, 1992), pp. 9-50.
Week 10: Complex multicultural societies, unhinged democratic foundations?
• Aryeh Botwinick & William E. Connolly, eds., Democracy and Vision: Sheldon Wolin and the Vicissitudes of the Political (Princeton, 2001):
--Fred Dallmayr, “Beyond Fugitive Democracy: Some Modern and Postmodern Reflections,” pp. 58-78;
--Charles Taylor, “A Tension in Modern Democracy,” pp. 79-95;
--Wendy Brown, “Reflections on Tolerance in the Age of Identity,” pp. 99-117.
• Jurgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (MIT, 1996), pp. 287-387;
• Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History (Princeton, 2001), pp. 3-17, 121-137.